The Foundations We Build On

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks, you guys.

Good morning.

It's so good to see you.

Yeah, I'm Jay.

If we've never met, uh I I know you.

You don't know me.

So I'm a creeper that way on the Insta.

You know what I mean?

Um, but the reason I creep on all of you, it's not because I'm naturally a creeper, I'm actually a pretty normal guy.

But I have a very, very deep, deep love and a very unique sort of um affinity for this faith community, obviously, because of what Ryan said.

Uh almost 11 years ago, because I think in September you all are celebrating the 11th birthday of this incredible faith community.

So almost exactly 11 years ago, I was here, like right here at Del Mar.

And I think our first month, maybe month and a half, uh, our worship gatherings were in the theater.

I know you guys have been in the theater a bit.

I st I still remember you guys our very first official Sunday.

I don't know how many of you were here.

My guess is it's it's very few of you.

How many of you were actually here on the first Sunday of Awakening?

A handful of the Grazians, of course, legends.

Yeah, a handful of others.

I know Marnie was as well.

I remember, Dave, were you with us when we got under the um stage that day?

Do you remember that?

We were like three hours away from literally opening the doors to this new church.

And so I don't know, rem I don't remember what was wrong, but something was wrong with the stage.

And you don't know this about me, but I am not handy with tools in my hands.

But when you're planting a church, it does not matter what you can or can't do, right?

So, Ryan, Dave, myself, a couple of others, none of us are really that handy with tools.

We get under the stage, and I'm like 50% of me was like, This is it, this is how I go to meet the Lord.

I'm gonna die under the stage because we're fixing a stage three hours before, and Ryan's gotta preach.

He's wearing like a nice shirt, it's getting all dirty, I'm all sweaty.

I mean, it was just wild.

But I remember back, I mean, that's one out of hundreds of stories in those early days, and I think back to that season of my life, not just ministry, but life and how formative it was for me as a follower of Jesus to literally sweat and bleed, to be a part of a community of Jesus followers being birthed in a place where following Jesus is so hard, like the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley.

Um, man, I would not trade that season of my life for anything.

It was so powerful.

So, because of that full circle, that's why I'm a creeper, and I follow all of you guys on Instagram, not all of you individually.

You're all scared now, like he follows me.

You're looking through your followers like, is this guy really following me?

That's weird.

Uh I mean this church and this church community, this body.

Uh, it means a lot to me.

So it's a joy for me, honestly, you guys.

Such a joy and an honor and a thrill to be back.

I actually haven't been back in uh in a decade.

Um, so it's really fun to be back with you all.

So let's jump in here.

Uh, what I want to do just for a few moments today with all of you is sort of look back a little bit to earlier this summer and um maybe look back and then look forward and ask the question as we look back on some things we explored together as a church community this past summer, what does that mean for us moving forward?

What I mean by that is this uh in June and July, you all went through um a series where you went line by line through uh text in the New Testament, uh, in the Gospel of Matthew, called the Beatitudes, right?

The Blessed Rs, right?

You went through like week by week, line by line.

We had friends of mine that were here, Dan Kimball and I think Steve Clifford and Nancy Ortberg, so many others, who came and taught sort of line by line.

What did Jesus mean when he said, Blessed are, blessed are the peacemakers, the meek, on and on.

And what's interesting is that whole section of Scripture, the Blessed Rs, the Beatitudes, are the beginning of what is probably the most famous sermon in history, what people call the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus gives a sermon on a mountainside, hence the Sermon on the Mount.

And today what I want to do is I want to look at the very end of the Sermon on the Mount as a way of propelling us from what we learned this summer into the rest of our lives.

So, to do that, let me show you an image.

This is the image of uh the very first telegraph machine that was ever developed.

Now, some of you, I'm just looking at your faces, and you have no idea what a telegraph machine is, because you don't really even know what a telephone is, right?

This is like, what is this?

Did they find this in a cave with the Neanderthals?

The telegraph machine was developed in the 1830s by a man named Samuel Morse.

And Samuel Morse, the name probably sounds familiar because you may know the term Morse code, right?

It's a way of communicating with essentially like bits and pieces of, you know, beeps and dots.

And essentially, Samuel Morse, who's this brilliant man, he created the telegraph machine as a way of communicating across great geographic divides in real time with immediacy.

And so the very first telegraph message was sent in the year 1844 between Washington, D.C.

and Baltimore, Maryland.

And essentially the way it worked was they laid a physical electrical wire between the two cities, Washington, D.C.

and Baltimore.

It's not that far, but it's far enough.

And they laid an electrical wire, and they were able to, using the telegraph machine and using Morse code, they were able to communicate between the two cities with almost immediate uh results, right?

It was real time.

And the telegraph machine, it rose to prominence so quickly that two decades later, by 1866, they had laid electrical wires, not between DC and Baltimore, but between the East Coast of the United States and Europe.

So within 20 years of developing the telegraph machine, human beings were able to now communicate literally across the planet, to the other side of the planet with almost immediate connection to one another.

The reason this is important is because the telegraph machine eventually gives rise to the telephone.

And the telephone eventually gives rise to things like radio, television, and those things obviously give way eventually to where we are today with the internet and social media and news media and the access to information all the time that you and I have with a touch of a finger in our back pockets.

Now think about this.

This began in 1844.

That's not that long ago.

It's less than 200 years ago.

So less than 200 years ago, up until about 200 years ago, for the remainder of human history before the last 200 years, communication, information, knowledge traveled at the speed of not technology, it traveled at the speed of travel, right?

If you wanted to get information from point A to point B up until 200 years ago, how quickly could you get that information across?

Well, you could get it across as quickly as you could travel.

And so, up until about the 1830s or 40s, when they developed the telegraph machine, the fastest way to travel at that point in history was train.

And trains at that time moved at about 35 miles an hour.

So until the telegraph machine, to get information from point A to point B, the fastest you could get that information from point A to point B was about 35 miles an hour.

When is the last time you drove in your car and you were driving in a 35 mile an hour zone and you actually drove 35 miles an hour?

When's the last time?

No one wants to raise their hand because you're like, oh my gosh, I'm a sinner.

Lord, please forgive me because you're breaking the speed limit all the time.

35 miles an hour seems so slow, right?

Now imagine your, I don't know, your Instagram feed and your friend who lives in Brooklyn, what they had for brunch yesterday.

You know that information.

You know it the moment they post about it.

And typically that friend posted about it before they even finished their brunch.

They sat down at this posh restaurant in the Fort Green neighborhood of Brooklyn, and they ordered their avocado toast that cost$28.

And they were like, I'm not gonna eat it, I'm gonna photograph it, right?

Because that's why I paid$28.

They pull out their phone, they take a photo of it, boom, it's up on their Instagram, and here you are, living in the Bay Area of California, literally on the other side of our nation, and you know in real time that your buddy is eating a$30 avocado toast in Brooklyn, New York, before he's even eaten the toast you know.

Right?

Now think about this.

What if it would have taken 35 miles an hour for your friend to communicate to you that they were having a$30 avocado toast?

Would they take the time?

Would you wait?

No.

You'd be like, dude, who cares?

What if you got a letter in the mail tomorrow, and it was your friend in Brooklyn, New York, and you you're like, oh my gosh, nobody ever sends like actual physical anal and analog letters anymore.

This is like so special, right?

You open the letter, you open it up, and all it is is a photo of avocado toast.

And a receipt.

It's like$28, and they left tips, so it's$38.

They paid for this avocado toast.

And then there's a time you can see on the receipt, it's like, oh, my friend, a week and a half ago, paid 40 bucks for an avocado toast.

What would you think to yourself?

You would think to yourself, first you'd be like, why$40 for an avocado toast?

And then you'd be like, why did you send this to me?

What is the point?

Right?

But because information travels so much more quickly now, this is normative.

To have access to this must information that that really in the big scheme of things doesn't really matter.

We have access to it and we enjoy it.

We love it, we love our feed.

Just scroll through, you're like, oh my gosh, avocado toast, and another one, and another one, right?

Whatever it might be.

And it's not all bad.

Sometimes social media and news media they give us access to information that's really necessary, it's really important.

I was just checking on um the hurricane down south.

I don't know if you guys have been following, but I have some friends who are pastors down there, and uh I was just checking on their social media and then on some news feeds this morning on how things are going, how their churches are going.

So we were communicating via text in real time, just praying for them, and um that's a really beautiful gift, right?

That it didn't have to take, you know, 35 miles an hour for me to get information about how they're doing.

So it's not all bad, but this is really important.

Telegr the telegraph changed um how we think about information.

There's a writer named Neil Postman, some of you know him.

He wrote a book about 40 years ago.

He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death.

And he says this telegraphy gave form of uh a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information.

That is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve.

The telegraph made information into a commodity, a thing that could be bought and sold, irrespective of its uses or meaning.

Today, you and I, we live in what most people call the information age, or the digital age, or the internet age.

And this is having a significant impact on how we continue to engage with and interact with knowledge and information.

Postman, again, he says this.

The tie between information and action has been severed.

Information is now a form of entertainment or worn like a garment to enhance one's status.

We are glutted with information.

We're drowning in information.

We have no control over it, and we don't know what to do with it.

And why does any of this matter?

It's interesting, but why does any of this matter?

Again, in June and July, you all went week by week, line by line, through Jesus' teachings in the early teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Blessed Hours.

And within the span of a few short chapters, Jesus gives, again, what is the greatest sermon ever, and he gives the blueprint for what life in the kingdom of God looks like.

But at the very end of that sermon, at the very end of the greatest sermon ever, at the very end of Jesus' blueprint for what it looks like to live the Jesus way in real life and in real time, he concludes the Sermon on the Mount this way.

He says, Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Puts them into practice.

That phrase in the original language of the text, Koine Greek, is a single Greek word.

It's the Greek word poieo.

And the Greek word poieo is a very simple word.

It just means to do.

So what Jesus is saying here is listen, I have given you the entire blueprint for what it looks like to be a God-centered, Jesus-centered person in a real way in the real world.

The blueprint for kingdom living.

But here's the deal.

If you just hear it, it's not enough.

You have to poieo.

Put it into practice.

You have to do it.

Don't just hear this stuff and applaud and say, wow, Jesus, great sermon.

Do this stuff.

Essentially, hearing or knowing or being informed or having great knowledge, great theological insight, or an understanding of the Greek language or historical cultural context, those things are all beautiful and wonderful and can be helpful, but they're not enough.

Especially today, it is easy to be informed.

There's so little actual change in our lives, even though we are more informed than any generation of human beings before us.

We know so much today, but we do so little.

This is catastrophic.

So again, Jesus is making the point here that doing the stuff of Jesus is what really matters.

In fact, let's look at just different translations of Matthew 7, 24.

In the ESV, it's translated: everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them.

The NLT, anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it.

Or the NRSV, everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them.

So the invitation is to do something, to follow up, to take action.

And then Jesus paints this really fascinating imagery.

Let's read the whole text.

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house.

Yet it did not fall.

Because it had its foundation on the rock.

But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.

And the rain came down and the streams rose and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

Fascinating.

Has anybody ever been to the Italian town of Pizza?

Not Pizza, but Pisa.

Anybody?

Yeah?

Have you you all have so you've seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa, right?

You can't go to Pisa without seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

You all know it.

1178, the year 1178, five years into construction, five years in, you guys, think about how frustrating this was.

Five years in, the builders of the Tower of Pisa are on the third floor at this point.

They're working on the third floor.

Five years in, three floors in, that's when they realize, dude, I don't know if this is straight.

Five years in, all this money, all this time, all this energy.

So you know what they do?

They're like, one or two or a dozen brilliant guys.

They're like, hey, here's what we should do.

Let's just compensate, let's not fix it.

Let's just compensate as we build and straighten it out.

So they start compensating by shortening the uphill side of the tower, which actually makes it worse.

And today we have the famous leaning tower of Pisa, which is off center by about 15 feet.

Now here's what's really interesting.

What the builders at the time did not know in as much detail as we know today.

It wasn't all their fault.

What's interesting is that there are two other bell towers in the city of Pisa that also tilt off-center.

One at the church of St.

Nicola and one at the church of St.

Michelle.

Now, this is because, in large part, uh the city, Pisa, it's actually named after a Greek word meaning marsh.

The word Pisa is actually, it's it comes from a Greek word meaning marsh, because the city sits near the ocean, and so the subsoil, not like the soil you can see on the on the like surface, but the subsoil, uh, the substance beneath is soaked in seawater.

And so it's a really unstable foundation.

And you wouldn't know that just looking at it on the surface.

But this is how life works, right?

It's not the stuff on the surface, it's the substance beneath that makes all the difference when it comes to the foundations that we build on, be it a tower or a life.

And this is the point Jesus is making that the substance beneath a life worth living isn't knowledge or information.

It's not just good ideas or good intentions or simply hoping that things will go well.

The substance beneath the soil of a life worth living, the substance that is strong enough to build a life worth living in Jesus is action.

It's participation with God in the way of Jesus.

It's not just learning and knowing the way of Jesus, those are critically important, of course.

You cannot possibly live the way of Jesus unless you learn the way of Jesus.

But simply learning the way of Jesus is unstable ground.

Living the way of Jesus, not just knowing what Jesus did, but trying to do what Jesus did.

Not just like him, Jesus is God.

We are not, of course.

But being a disciple of Jesus means like following Jesus into life and into the The world and living as an embodiment of the way of Jesus.

Again, Christians are a people of hope, of course.

But we hope in and through action.

Our hope is a participatory hope.

Eugene Peterson once said this hoping, excuse me, hoping does not mean doing nothing.

It is not fatalistic resignation.

It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.

We build strong and durable foundations for a meaningful life by going about our assigned tasks, by learning and living or doing the way of Jesus.

You know, sometimes I have two little kids.

I have an eight-year-old daughter named Harper, and then a five-year-old son named Simon.

And like 70% of the time, they play really well together.

But 30% of the time, some of you had siblings growing up, I'm sure.

Some of you maybe have young children, and you've experienced this firsthand.

30% of the time, it's just World War III in my house.

You know what I mean?

And it's never, it's never like a nice, happy medium.

It's always they're just happy, off running together, playing and having the greatest time, best friends, and then 30% of the time it's just like they're at each other's throats.

And every time I try to discipline them, I always, you know, I sit them down after they've had a big fight and I talk to them about why we need to treat one another a particular way, why our family values dictate that we love each other and compromise and sacrifice for one another, and on and on and on.

And at the end of it, I always ask them, like, okay, Harper Simon, do you understand?

I've always asked them that.

You want to know something really incredible?

Not once in their lives have either of them told me, no, dad, I don't understand.

Tell me more.

Not once have they said that.

Always they're like, yeah, totally understand.

Completely get it, dad.

I'm with you.

Never again, is what they say.

You know what I mean?

But what inevitably happens two days later, or two hours later, or two minutes later?

What inevitably happens?

They just get, they fall right back into the same rhythm.

Now, as a dad who loves my children and understands where they are in their stages of development, nothing but grace.

I mean, they're eight and five.

It's normal.

They're gonna fight, they're gonna stumble and fall along the way.

That's a normal thing to expect of an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, of course.

But why do I continue coming back?

Every time they fight, why do I continue reminding them?

Is it so that I can just go through the same routine and rhythm?

Is it because my hope is that I'll just go through the same routine and rhythm for the next 40 years of their lives?

No, the hope and the desire is that eventually over time, they would not simply understand knowledge-wise, but that they in their actions they would embody what they know.

And what's really interesting is in the last few years, couple of years, I've watched them grow, where they embody it just a little bit, more and more every single day, where they begin to show a little bit more grace, a little bit more compromise toward one another.

My desire for them is not simply that they know how to be, but they actually be the way that God has called them to be, the way that our family values sort of dictate and necessitate that they interact with one another.

I love the way Dallas Willard puts it.

He says that our aim under love is not to be loving to this or that person, or in this or that kind of situation, but to be a person possessed by love as an overall character of life, whatever is or is not going on.

I do not come, I love this line right here.

I do not come to my enemy and then try to love them.

I come to them as a loving person.

This is the difference between knowing, okay, this is my enemy, I despise this person, but I know God said, love your enemies.

So I'm just, I'm gonna try, I guess.

It's this mental exercise that is almost impossible to accomplish.

But instead, to love our enemies, we just need to become loving people.

That regardless of whether this is friend or foe, who I am becoming, what I am doing with my life, how I am leaning and directing my energy and my focus is in the direction of love.

Christ-centered love.

Love is a condition of the will.

It is not something you choose to do, but what you choose to be.

And so, what does this actually mean?

What does this actually look like?

If you go back, not just to the Beatitudes, but all of Matthew chapters 5 and 6 and 7, which essentially are the Sermon on the Mount, what are some of the things Jesus says?

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

He says, Let your light shine before others by your good deeds.

He instructs us to fight anger and lust.

He teaches us to keep our promises.

He tells us again to love our enemies.

He teaches us to quietly give to those in need, to store up heavenly treasures and not earthly ones, to stop worrying about tomorrow, and to trust God today.

He teaches us to not judge.

These are just a handful of examples.

In fact, I would encourage you, it doesn't take long, I mean, it'll take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes, tops, to read all of Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

If you've got some time later today, I would encourage you, take 10, 15 minutes and read the Sermon on the Mount.

And read it and ask yourself the question, not just, do I know this stuff?

Of course you know this stuff.

You just read it, you know it.

But ask yourself, am I doing this stuff?

Am I living this stuff?

Am I embodying this stuff?

Let me just make one point clear here.

If I'm not careful, a lot of this can come across a little bit like works-based uh faith or something.

Right?

Like what I'm essentially telling you is like, hey, if you want to be a good Christian, you better like behave appropriately.

If you want to be a good Christian, if you want to live in God's good graces, you better do the right things.

You better like, you know, check everything off on the task list that God demands of you as a follower of Jesus.

But this is actually the reverse of that.

It is the grace of God that is unmerited, it is unearned, it is the grace of God which compels us to embody the way of Jesus.

Listen, if what you heard from me today is compelling you out of guilt or out of shame or out of some sort of strange sense of Christian duty, it's driven by fear, then don't do any of it.

Because what the scriptures tell us is that perfect love, the love of God, casts out fear.

So, first and foremost, what we have to understand is if our following of Jesus is driven by any sense of unhealthy fear, and I know this is a reality, um, there's been all sorts of psychological psychological research done based on like how Christians view their relationship with God as father, and how it's so reflective of our own relationships with our own earthly dads.

I had no relationship with my father.

I remember my dad died.

We were about a year into awakening.

We had planted this church.

I remember I was supposed to preach one Sunday here, and the Wednesday before I was supposed to preach, I got a phone call that my father had died.

He lived his entire life in Korea, and I remember just breaking down in tears in a totally unexpected way because he was a stranger to me.

And I remember calling Ryan about 30 minutes after that phone call and saying, I can't preach Sunday, I gotta fly to Korea and bury a dad who I did not know.

And so I like I still have those distinct memories.

And my history or non-existent history with my father has in many ways colored and shaped my own sort of ongoing journey with God the Father.

And so here, I just want to be very, very clear here.

None of this call to do the Jesus stuff should be driven by some sort of anxiety or fear that God is some angry dad who is going to punish you if you don't meet expectations.

He already sent his son to die for you.

He did this for you before you ever breathed your first breath.

The scriptures tell us that God knew you, that he dreamt you up in his creative imagination out of love before you were ever formed in your mother's womb.

God's posture toward you is a posture of love, and that has always been true, and it will always be true, and it will never change.

So, this invitation to do the Jesus stuff is simply an invitation to respond appropriately to the grace and the love of God that we have already received in spades.

Uh, because um, you know, we don't get hurricanes in California.

That's like a Florida thing, right?

Uh well, um 2018, about five years ago, October of 2018, I don't know if you guys remember, but there was a hurricane called Hurricane uh Michael that swept through parts of Florida and all sorts of parts of Central America and Cuba.

And um the peak winds were like 160 miles an hour, caused about$25 million in damages in the US alone, and um it wiped out entire cities.

But uh this photo that you're looking at right now is um on a beach in Florida, a beach called Mexico Beach, Florida, and uh you see this lone house standing.

It looks photoshopped, doesn't it?

It looks fake.

It's not fake.

This is a real photo of a house called the Sand Palace.

And the reason the Sand Palace withstood Hurricane Michael is because this was the one house on this entire beach that was built with reinforced concrete.

It had 40 feet, uh 40-foot pilings that were driven deep into the ground.

And so when the hurricane came, this is the one house because of its foundation that withstood the storm.

And that's what Jesus is saying.

Living, practicing, doing the stuff I've taught you to do, and not if, but when the storms of life come, you will experience stability.

You will experience strength.

You will experience the ability, not in and of your own strength, but the God-given ability to withstand even the greatest storms.

In our first few years of planting this church, those of you who were around, the Grazians might remember, maybe Marnie will too.

Um do you guys remember Kirk and Christina Tang?

I don't know if you guys remember them.

Um beautiful young couple.

They were uh newlyweds in our church.

They were with us from day one when we planted here at Del Mar.

And they had gotten married, um, but and they were newlyweds, they were kind of fresh out of college, and Christina um during their engagement, she started having really serious stomach pains.

And during their engagement, Christina um discovered that she had a very aggressive form of stomach cancer.

She was in her early 20s.

And the doctors told her, hey, this is not years, this is months.

Like it could be weeks.

We don't really know.

It's pretty bad.

And um, that's the condition she was in when I met her, when our church sort of met them.

And I remember I still have a photograph of it.

Um and it it's uh it's really hard to look at and beautiful to look at.

Uh, one of the last times Christina was with us at a church service, was um a Christmas Eve service we did right here in this room.

And back then we had a stage actually down here on the floor, and uh we didn't know how long Christina had to be with us, and she was an incredibly gifted musician.

So Ryan and I, who are incredibly mediocre musicians, we were like, dude, let's just write her coattails.

So the three of us led worship on a Christmas Eve together.

Ryan, myself, and Christina.

And Christina like carried us, you know, with her vocals.

And uh I just remember that Christmas Eve as she led just how powerful it is, because she's singing, you know, she's singing songs about um Christ coming to be with us and us going to be with him and salvation and eternity.

And uh I remember those words had so much more weight because for her, uh this was like real stuff.

You know what I mean?

Like for her, it wasn't some hypothetical, like, oh, I'm 23, this is like a nice song to sing, great words to sing, but I got like 50 more years before I have to worry about going to be with the Lord, you know?

For her, she's just like, this might be the last time I sing this, and the next time I sing it, I might be singing it in the presence of Christ.

Who knows?

Long story short, not long after that, just a couple of months after that, um, I was uh by her bedside with her husband and some friends and some folks from our church and praying with her as she breathed her last few breaths.

And I remember those few months of her final days.

Uh she um she was a songwriter and she had written all these songs about her sort of journey with Jesus as she faced death.

And she pushed herself so hard to finish those songs, and our church rallied around her and helped her record the songs in a studio and had them mixed and mastered.

And when she passed away, I remember we gave um CDs to everybody in our church, and um what I remember most about her is that I would spend so much time writing sermons that I thought were like these are this is a good sermon, it's gonna inspire some people.

And I would find myself having such perspective shifts when I was with her those last few months.

Because I realized these words I'm putting down that I'm gonna read to people in a room, they're one thing, they're important, they're helpful, hopefully, but man, this is it.

Like this is it, this is the real stuff.

Like living the way of Jesus as you face death.

This is the real stuff.

And I saw a young woman in her early 20s be hit with the storm of literal death stand tall.

Like on a beach laid waste by fear and anxiety.

I visited her at Stanford Hospital in the terminal ward, at the cancer ward, where there was just hopelessness, anxiety everywhere, and her little bed and her little what she was living in with every fiber of her being.

And this is what happens when we not just know, but we do take the Jesus step.

We can withstand any storm, even the storms of death.

Think about the words of the psalmist and psalm 8.

The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.

My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Jesus, we um thank you for the gift of your teachings.

We thank you for the scriptures, we thank you for the gospels, which give us the blueprint for what it looks like to live the life of the kingdom.

But we know that you call us to do so much more than just know, to be informed, or to read these words.

You call us to live them, to embody them.

So we ask that you would give us the strength and the courage and the confidence to do just that.

To live and to embody the way of Jesus in all things.

So that no matter what storms of life may come, we are able to stand with you as our foundation.

Pray these things, Jesus, in your name.

Amen.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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